Irish Coffee (2 page)

IN HIS OFFICE IN THE JOYCE
Athletic and Convocation Center Fred Neville sat with his hands poised over the keyboard of his computer like a pianist waiting out the strings before rejoining the concerto. On the screen before him short uneven lines awaited completion. Fred's lips moved contemplatively as he ran through words rhyming with
dust
. The assistant sports information director was dropping into poetry. The lines on the monitor represented one complete stanza and the partial one on which he had become stuck. A face appeared around the open doorway, Pryzwara, one of the assistant basketball coaches.

“Spell my name right,” Pryzwara said and advanced grinning into the office. Fred hastily changed screens on his computer.

“I can spell it but no one can pronounce it.”

Pryzwara pronounced his name several times. It sounded like a Bronx cheer.

“Coming with us to Dayton, Fred?”

“Not my turn.”

“Just prepare a release on a victory.” Pryzwara sat. Fred had already switched gears. For ten minutes he discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the team the Irish would face in Dayton.

“Tell me about Digger and UCLA.”

Fred told him. Both he and Pryzwara had been boys when under Digger Phelps the Notre Dame basketball team had won an historic victory over the legendary John Wooden's previously unbeaten UCLA team, a victory that ranked with Rockne's win over Army, another contest Fred could recount as if he had been an eyewitness. Pryzwara sat rapt through the recital.

“Wooden was a high school coach in South Bend before he went on to college coaching.”

“You're a walking archive, Fred.” Pryzwara rose, clapped him on the back and headed for the door. “Want the door left open?”

“Better close it.”

The door closed. Fred let a minute go by and then brought up the broken lines of his poem and stared at them. Inspiration had fled. He opened a drawer of his desk and looked at a photograph there without taking it out. He sighed and turned again to his monitor.

Here the muse had deserted him and Pryzwara's visit had filled his mind again with the lore that was his stock-in-trade. He stored the unfinished poem in the file he had labeled
Egan,
stole another look at the photograph in his drawer and was suddenly overwhelmed by the futility of his mad desire to match the literary output of Maurice Francis Egan.

“Assistant sports information director,” he said aloud and there was derision in his voice.

As an undergraduate his only publications had appeared in the back pages of
The Observer
, in sports, the pieces that along with those he had written as a journalist in Toledo had been the basis of his return to campus and the sports information office. His position should have made him proud—he knew a dozen men who would kill to take his place—but he sat in his office and repined. His friendship with the Knight brothers, Phil and Roger, summed up his dilemma. He could regale Phil with items from the history of Notre Dame athletics but it was when he talked with Roger that his heart was full. In the Knight apartment he could reveal his first love and speak with Roger of literature, of Maurice Francis Egan and other literary heroes. But not even to Roger had he confessed that he aspired to be something more than a consumer of the works of others. Not even to Roger could he admit the contents of the file called
Egan
.

There was a knock on the door.

It was Muffin McGraw, coach of the Lady Irish, short-skirted, high-heeled, a look of tragic concern on her little face.

“We've got a problem.” She sat and looked at Fred with wide eyes. “Griselda.”

“Was she injured in practice?”

“She said she might leave the team.”

“Leave the team!” Fred's expression now matched the coach's. A team without Griselda Novak was an internal combustion engine without a distributor. He made a mental note of the simile, praying he would never have to use it.

“Talk to her, Fred.”

“Me?”

“She raves about you. You could influence her. You've got to talk sense to her.”

“I will. What's the problem?”

“She wants to become a professor. She feels she is wasting valuable time playing basketball.” McGraw whispered these words as a believer might repeat the blasphemy of an infidel.

“Ah.”

“Will you talk to her?”

“Of course I'll talk to her. She can't quit the team. She is the very definition of the student athlete. She can do both.”

“Bless you, Fred. Tell her that. Are you going to Dayton with the men?”

“No.”

“Good. Talk to her tonight.”

 

He took Griselda to dinner at Parisi's from which an unimpeded view of the illuminated golden dome was visible.

“Just us?”

“I couldn't get hold of Roger.” This implied that he had tried, which was a lie. But he had to be alone with Griselda. It was clear to Fred that Roger Knight was the origin of her problem.

“His class is wonderful.”

“Tell me about it.”

A tactical mistake. Fred was drawn by her admiration for their mutual friend and soon they were discussing Roger's account of nineteenth-century female Catholic novelists.

“He recognizes their limitations of course. But he emphasizes their good points. That's how he differs from the others. He isn't interested in scoring easy points.”

“Scoring points is never easy.”

“You should sit in on some of my classes.”

“Muffin dropped in on me today.”

A toss of her ponytail. “Hence this unusual invitation.”

“She thinks you are considering giving up basketball.”

“Look, I can talk to you. You know Roger. What would you rather be, a pro athlete who burns out in a couple of years never more to be seen, or someone like him?”

She had stated his own dilemma and he felt the falsity of his position. How could he argue against a sentiment that was his own. “Not a choice I have to make.”

“But what if it's mine?”

“You want to be a female version of Roger Knight.”

“Even a pale copy would do. He can go on doing what he is doing forever. Today in class he talked about Maurice Francis Egan. Do you know him?”

“Yes.”

“I'd never even heard the name before. That's why his class is exciting. Not only is it taught at Notre Dame, it
is
Notre Dame. Why do people think this place begins and ends with Knute Rockne?”

“No one thinks that.”

“Meaning you don't. What do the coaches and players know of the real Notre Dame?”

The point of this dinner was to make the case for Griselda's continuing to play basketball. But Fred found that he was more sympathetic to Griselda's doubts about a life in sports, meaning as she had said a few years in the pros and then what? Color commentary on a cable network, waxing enthusiastic about each new crop of players.

“‘A veritable snowstorm of virginity.'”

“What?”

“Christopher Fry.”

“Did he teach here?”

“No.”

“Fred, I know you understand what I'm saying. How long have you known Roger Knight?”

“I think you should talk to him about this.”

“So do I. But Muffin asked me to talk to you first.”

She'd had half a glass of wine and he finished the bottle. The dinner was on his expense account. He was light-headed when they went out to his car.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the golden dome.

“The dome that Sorin built.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

“I'm okay.”

She punched his arm. “I can see why Roger likes you so much.”

That was the one remark of the evening that stayed with him. For now, Griselda could play basketball and be a student and then choose what future she would.

MARJORIE SHUSTER'S HUSBAND
had taught in the government department during the days when Gerhardt Niemeir and Stephen Kertecz had set the tone of the department. It was political philosophy then, not a lesser branch of the social sciences riddled with statistics and supposedly objective analyses. Vision had already begun to dim when Nathaniel Shuster died, leaving Marjorie to raise Mary. There had never been any question of leaving Notre Dame and Marjorie stayed on in their home in Harter Heights. She had gone to work in the library and eventually, after graduating, Mary got a job in admissions. They might have been carrying on a family tradition. But Marjorie would not have been a mother if she did not say novena after novena, praying that Mary would find the right man, have a family, gild Marjorie's later years with grandchildren. But Mary was nearing thirty and there was no man in prospect and Marjorie was becoming desperate. She herself had married at twenty-one. A sign of her desperation was that, when Roger Knight arrived on campus, she began to cultivate him as a potential son-in-law. Marjorie could hardly question her daughter's failure to see in the enormous Huneker professor a possible mate. For all that, they became fast friends. And there was Philip.

“I'm surprised you're not married,” Marjorie said to Phil in that voice women adopt when the good of the race is at issue.

“You wouldn't be if you knew what I come across in my line of work.”

“I don't understand.”

“A private investigator could make a fortune dealing only with wives who want to get rid of their husbands or husbands who want to get rid of their wives. I've seen too much of it.”

“Is that what you do for a living?”

“I'm in semiretirement since Roger and I moved here.”

“So you made your fortune from disgruntled spouses.”

“Oh, I never handled divorces, not after one or two of them. In fact, I explicitly ruled them out.”

“And your views haven't mellowed.” Marjorie had recovered her matchmaking voice.

“Even if they had, it's a little late for that sort of thing.”

“Oh bosh.” She looked him over with the calculating eye of a carnival guesser. He was lean whereas Roger was…well, there was a lot to Roger. Phil's blond hair was graying in a way women paid large sums to match. And he was tall. Marjorie liked a tall man, a preference she never referred to her late husband, the five-seven Professor Nathaniel Shuster. “If you're fifty I'll eat your hat.”

Phil fetched a Notre Dame cap and handed it to her. “Or would you like it cooked?”

“You're not yet fifty?”

“I'll get you another hat.”

But there was a lot to say for a mature man who had seen a lot of the world. A woman who put her mind to it could alter his cynical notion of marriage. But was Mary the woman? An overture of the most oblique kind elicited trilling laughter from her daughter. “Philip Knight! That old bachelor.”

“Most men are bachelors before they get married.”

“I'd rather marry Roger.”

“Then do it, for heaven's sake.”

“Oh Mother.”

“You know how old we are going to be on our next birthday.”

Marjorie wished Mary would not laugh in that derisive way.

“Mother, when I fall in love I'll keep it a secret until the wedding day.”

“
When
you fall in love?”

“
If
I fall in love.”

So it was back to the novenas. Was the response to her prayers that the Knight brothers became their good friends despite her efforts on Mary's behalf? From time to time Roger would reciprocate for dinners at the Shusters by putting on one of his virtuoso performances in the kitchen. How he managed it when he prepared quantities sufficient for a regiment she never knew, but his
risotto con funghi e piselli
was fluffy and perfectly seasoned, his quiche lorraine exquisite. But he took as much pride in his popcorn as anything else. They had been invited over to watch Notre Dame play Dayton on television, and Gregory Whelan was there as well. A mute rather than a mate, Marjorie had cruelly decided long ago, though when Mary and Roger talked away about God knows what while Marjorie and Phil followed the game, the unfamiliar and fluent voice of the archivist was heard. But the excitement of the game soon drove such thoughts from Marjorie's head. It was still halftime when Fred Neville showed up with Griselda Novak in tow.

All the men sprang to their feet as the star athlete came in. Mary on the other hand turned her back on the huddle that formed around Griselda and joined her mother before the television set.

“Who is he?”

“Someone with Griselda, obviously.”

“Griselda!” She was but a girl.

“They've been out to dinner.”

“Really.”

Another little balloon of hope floated away. If only Mary would show a little interest something might happen but she had visibly snubbed the newcomer. Phil came back and dropped into his chair just as the second half was about to begin.

“Who's the man?” asked Marjorie.

“Man? That's Fred Neville. I'll introduce him during a commercial.”

But Fred Neville had taken Roger aside and Griselda wandered in and sat on the floor.

“Who's winning?” she asked.

Mary ignored her; Phil was absorbed in the game. Marjorie said, “I think we are.”

Maybe she shouldn't have said that. In a game anything can happen. And Marjorie felt that any project she backed was doomed. But Mary, bless her heart, was now sitting on the arm of Phillip's chair and turning on the charm. However weary from past jumps, hope springs eternal. What a wonderful couple they would make, Mary and Philip Knight.